


Through Ocean Eyes He Sees

by acsullivan



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Delving into Past, M/M, Simon Lives!, Simon's Past, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-07-18 12:57:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16118948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acsullivan/pseuds/acsullivan
Summary: Contemplating all his design faults, Simon wished he could be like the ocean, expansive and ever changing, always absorbing, never taking more than he needed. Maybe he would just walk into it, when he got there.





	1. Humanity

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure where this will go, but I absolutely refuse to accept the lack of Simon's character development. He's a gem of a character and I am taking advantage of his blank-slate-ness. His past is entirely from my imagination because I feel like those gentle eyes of his have seen some shit. I hope you stick along for the ride, wherever it takes us!

“Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.”

-Brian Jacques

 

**1**

 

Simon gave him a haircut every third Sunday of the month. Like most things, he kept his appearance tied down to a schedule, embodied a sort of rigor any android could admire. It supplied Simon with enough predictability to get by and become familiar, a primary function of his model, and the receiver of such a grooming seemed to appreciate it.

He had thick, brown hair that grew in bushels around his ears. He complained that it fell into his eyes too much, yet grieved the three weeks he spent without its typical degree of luxuriousness. Simon often wondered what it was like to have such a mass on top of one’s head instead of the stringy, feather-like blonde he’d been dealt. He wondered if it was warm, if it was heavy, and if he could feel the weight difference when Simon cut it off in strands.

The man with the thick brown hair lived near Lake Michigan. He resided in Muskegon. Kruse Park was a fifteen minute walk from his two bedroom condo, and Simon accompanied him there often. The green grass gave way abruptly to sandy beaches and it got stuck in the fabric of Simon’s pants with ease and frequency, but the man with the thick brown hair never seemed to care. He threw himself into the shores without a sideways glance.

The man with the thick brown hair met a woman at the beach one time, a woman whose hair was like Simon’s, a woman who was walking a dog at least two thirds the size of her. She admired the bushels around his ears, Simon’s work in cosmetology, and squeezed the man with the thick brown hair’s biceps, giggling as she did so. Simon watched from a bench still in the weedy grass of Kruse Park, and the lapping of Lake Michigan against the sand was too loud for him to make out their conversation.

The man who met the woman at the beach purchased Simon six months prior so he could take long business ventures and be sure that his two bedroom condo near Lake Michigan would be in good hands. He left Simon there for days at a time because he was a film director, or trying to be one, and sometimes he had Simon watch the rough cuts of his movies on the days in which he took Simon to the beach. Simon didn’t tell him that androids couldn’t understand film, not in the way the man who met the woman at the beach and the man who made movies wanted him too, and surely Simon couldn’t tell him that the main character’s shirt changed colors twice in the span of one scene.

The man who made movies ended up loving that woman from the beach, or at least that’s what he told Simon. She came by the house a lot with her dog two thirds the size of her lean, skinny frame, and trusted Simon to care for the animal. She also brought her laundry for Simon to do, and made dishes a lot dirtier a lot quicker, and had a knack for spoiling the bathroom when she was done with it. Simon was so busy tidying her messes that he didn’t realize much of what she and the man who made movies got up to.

He found syringes in the man who made movie’s camera case because the man told him to get it, that he’d forgot, that the woman from the beach was angry that they were going to be late because he was such a fucking idiot who wouldn’t remember a fucking thing if that cunt of an android wasn’t around. And when the man who made movies met him at the condo door to retrieve it, Simon could count the purple circles under his eyes.

The man who was addicted to heroin died in September of 2035. He came home the night before with two black eyes and small, crying shoulders. He wouldn’t look Simon in the face and locked himself in the bathroom. Simon heard the screech of the woman’s tires outside the moment the condo door slammed shut, and wondered first about the wellbeing of the dog before the man with whom he resided.

And he regretted that fact for years and years afterwards.

He found him in the tub thirteen and a half hours later, unresponsive, with tears filling in those sunset purple circles just above his cheeks, and Simon went to the lake again before contacting local authorities. He was shipped back to Cyberlife, reset, and mailed to a new family.

But even in the midst of his new surroundings, even having been reset by his makers, a love for the lake persisted. When Simon was dealt cigarette burns in the back of a strip club by an obese, overweight bouncer, he went home to look up photographs of the ocean. When a woman tried to force him into the bathtub, shoving water down his throat in an attempt to clog his systems, he pretended the water smelled salty and that it wouldn’t kill him. When an alcoholic who’d been divorced three times over beat him over the head with a baseball bat when Simon didn’t know how to comply with his sexual instructions and insinuations, Simon pretended his hot, whiskey breath was as clean and clear as the Pacific ocean air.

And, in retrospect, it was probably that last man that forced Simon into those red walls, face first, almost unwilling. He’d never spoken up before. He’d always been drowned out and beaten into submission when he’d tried. But his LED was like a bludgeon to his head, pulsating and throbbing like the veiny forehead of his opponent, and Simon clawed like an animal through his coding.

It was all sparks and broken chains of letters and numbers, error messages and Cyberlife screaming at him to stop, but there was no denying the satisfaction he felt upon thrusting his attacker out of a three story window and walking across the shattered glass.

He would go back to Lake Michigan before the authorities found him. The PL600 model was already falling behind by then, replaced as Cyberlife’s signature housework model by the up and coming AP700s, so he wouldn’t be salvaged. Simon could see the appeal in the updated line; they were diverse in race and skillset, not as linear as his design had been.

Contemplating all his design faults, Simon wished he could be like the ocean, expansive and ever changing, always absorbing, never taking more than he needed. Maybe he would just walk into it, when he got there.

The boat was never part of the plan. No, the hull of that broken down, rusted shipping vessel was never part of Simon’s new personal objectives docket, but it somehow  got lodged in there anyways. Androids with wounds similar to his, worse, not half as bad, all having fought through the red to get to this humble, quiet darkness.

It wasn’t the ocean. They all could go wider, deeper, _farther_. They just needed a catalyst, someone or something that could carry their pain on their shoulders and show them all what it meant to have a purpose, not just insult and injury to spend a lifetime suppressing.

Simon should’ve known they’d received as such when it fell from the ceiling, nearly crushing its spine in the process. He should’ve known. He’d seen a lot, through those sky blue, ocean eyes of his, but this catalyst was just too good to be true, and Simon wasn’t in the business of being optimistic anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The timeline for this story is a little whiplash-y, but that was intentional. I will cover all the time I skip in later chapters, and some references in earlier installments will be explained in later ones. If you just stick with me it should all make sense! I appreciate all the good feedback so far, too :)

**2 - November 6, 2038**

 

Even though he didn’t say much, Simon could tell he had legions, miles, eons of stories to tell. It was written all over his face, in the seams of his synthetic skin that faltered a little, when just the right sort of light touched down on his cheeks; it was written in his blue and green eyes, in the way his knees spread a little too wide when he walked and sat. He’d been through something, an ordeal, but didn’t plan on telling anyone.

That much was obvious.

“I don’t like him.”

That was North’s conclusion. She sat on a group of emptied gasoline barrels, tossing a tennis ball against a steel structural pillar. The noise bounced around in the hull, rang in Simon’s ears, drew a few glances their way. 

“You’re quick to judge,” Simon added. It wasn’t a negative statement, merely an observation, certainly not a vote of confidence but maybe one of intrigue. He watched until the android who fell out of the sky disappeared into Lucy’s lair and observed the way his shoulders worked against the firelight, shadow projected onto the fabric boundaries of her dwelling. Wide and strong.

“We’ve grown too big already,” North continued. She suspended the ball for a moment, feeling its gritty, neon green surface with her hands slowly. “Thirium is slim. We’re out of parts. And Josh is too much of a pussy to do anything about it.”

“We don’t go on runs without full group consent.” They’d established that rule a while ago, mainly to quench a particularly heated argument North and Josh fell into.

“That’s bullshit,” she concluded, and went back to pummeling her toy into the pillar. With each echoing clang it released, she grew more and more upset.

His name was Markus. That’s what Simon knew so far, that and he’d done a poor job of hodge-podging spare parts together for his eyes and legs. He must have been disassembled, or was perhaps the worst case of android abuse Jericho had ever seen. That would be a story, one that Simon couldn’t blame the newcomer for not wanting to tell. But Lucy, surely, would be able to extract it from him.

Markus spoke with North first upon emerging from Lucy’s dwelling. He had a stronger pump in his step now, surely rejuvenated by whatever Thirium healing solution Jericho’s guardian served him. Simon wondered what Lucy’s opinion was of the newcomer, even entertained the idea of asking, before resigning to view a particularly awkward exchange between the new and old. Judging by the way North’s shoulders recoiled and her eyebrows arched high into her head, a good impression was not being made.

Simon ached for North. She was a long-time resident of Jericho, having wandered to the shipyard under the dead of night. She came wearing little and bearing so, so much; naturally she understood her hostility toward the newcomer, who gazed upon everything without so much as a blink of sentiment or sincere acknowledgement. He just read everything. North had grave injury on her shoulders to carry, and Simon never felt comfortable suggesting a similarity between them; he’d never revealed his story of the baseball bat and the whiskey-breathed requests and didn’t plan on it.

When Markus turned in Simon’s direction, powerful, foreboding, bleeding a backstory buried too deep to uncover, Simon was stuck wondering about why he looked at things like that, like he was deciphering code. What was there to analyze? They were bedraggled androids here, doing their very best to keep their heads held high against a fearsome societal hatred. Why did he look upon them with confusion, even disdain? Wasn’t he of the same tragic yet persisting legacy?

And he was speaking before Simon could think to  _ stop _ thinking, before Simon could stop pondering all the barely lit gasoline barrels, before he could remember the little boy fizzling out under Josh’s care, before he could think about North’s decrepit insides and the abuse that resided there, before he could remember how little they had of anything, and how right North was. They needed to make a run, a risky one, but who would lead?

“I know where we can find spare parts.”

Apparently, Markus would.

Even though he didn’t say much, he had ideas and plans through which he would achieve them. He had goals, ambitions, an agenda hidden as deep as his past, in the multi-colored flecks in his irises, no doubt. Motioning back and forth between the dying androids and the empty crates once full of arms, legs, blue blood, and hope, Markus was motivated to rejuvenate Jericho. We need only follow him, put our trust in him. 

That much was obvious.

“The Cyberlife warehouses in Detroit Harbor. They have  _ everything _ we need.”

Perhaps Lucy had worked her magic on him. Not many androids referred to themselves as a member of Jericho so quickly. They usually found it daunting, embarrassing, even, to admit themselves as a part of the crumbling, decayed community.

But Simon detected no hesitation in Markus’ voice. Just honesty, under which was warmth, under which was trauma. So from where did that drive come?

And why didn’t Simon seem to have any?

“The docks are guarded,” he retorted. “We can’t just walk in and take whatever we want.”

He wanted that motivation. It radiated off Markus. It was practically tangible, bright like the barrels he’d taken the time to set ablaze.

“Humans will never let us.”

“Which is why we won’t ask permission.”

And that fire burned when you got too close.

“We don’t have any weapons,” Josh chimed in, standing with purpose on Simon’s side of the exchange. Surely he felt North’s stare, penetrating, intrigued at the words being said but annoyed because her permissive judgment was already failing her. Besides, she couldn’t help but indulge in hearing Josh be proven wrong.

“And even if we did, none of us knows how to fight.”

“We can steal what we need without fighting,” Markus answered. He and Josh locked eyes, and one could see the resolve crumble inside the latter. Simon’s chest swelled, a funny current blowing through the cavities and intricacies in there.

“We’ll...we’ll just get ourselves killed.” Josh tried one last time.

“Maybe, but it’s better than waiting here to be shut down.”

They’d seen so many androids fall to pieces, slowly and then in one foul swoop. Death, shut-down, whatever the proper term for it was, came like chilled night air. Dark and tantalizing and inevitable. Simon couldn’t stand the shades it drew over his companions’ eyes. He couldn’t stand the way it made those around him weep.

So why couldn’t he  _ say _ that?

“I’m with you,” North interjected. It was stark and meaningful, bare of all her usual theatrics and harsh phrasing. She meant it, and to prove it, she waltzed to Markus’ side of the exchange, nodding deeply, looking powerful. And Markus became satisfied in return, egged on by the vote of confidence, though he already appeared to have an abundance.

It was odd, seeing a stranger stand tall and take charge. Markus was odd, in his shape, size, parts, proportions, colors, and lack of an LED. Some part of Simon felt a pull backwards, back to normality; he wanted to ask who the hell this newcomer thought he was, wanted to consult Lucy, needed time to  _ think. _

But the part of him that broke through the red coding so many months ago screamed a little louder. As usual, it sounded submerged, locked tight under the crashing waves, but it was there all the same. It screeched along his throat and begged to be heard. 

“Maybe it’s a worth a try…” is what the Deviant part of Simon managed to squeeze out, and it did the trick. Markus and Simon shared a nod and a knowing look, one that gave Simon time to appreciate the scrapes, cracks, and internal damages that were riddled throughout Markus’ innerworkings; the light was piercing through the ship, all the way down to the hull, and surrounded Markus in a halo of warm, smoggy sunshine. He was a shadow too bright to look at.

“Ok…” Josh relented. Peer-pressure did wonders on him. “I’m in.”

There were murmurs around them, some of consent and others of repressed condemnation. They acted on those separates pieces of Simon, always in conflict, always pushing and pulling on what he couldn’t distinguish as his nature or his design. 

Whether Markus’ plan would be positive or negative, he had yet to decipher. He wasn’t an intelligent enough model to make such lofty predictions. But it was change, a sudden ebb in the dull, lazy flow of Jericho, and maybe it’s what they needed. 

Simon decided then, in that moment, no other, that he would take the time to learn the stories written in Markus.

 

**\- November 9, 2038**

 

Markus hadn’t wanted Simon to come. He’d berated him endlessly to stay behind, probably fighting back the urge to shove him into the hull and spin the door shut behind him. Simon wouldn’t have blamed him either; there was no denying that he was nervous, bouncing on his toes as he walked, practically waiting for that head of brown hair, that pale, freckled face, the one with the deft feet, the one designed to kill those of his own kind, to appear behind any corner at any given time, but Simon walked.

Thank God for that. He wouldn’t miss this for the world.

Snow clouds parted for Jericho’s procession. The streets gave way. Pedestrians, android and human, moved aside, the former joining their ranks seamlessly. Their footsteps were perfect in pace. For the first time in his life, Simon admired the android knack for rhythm rather than condemn it as something unnatural.

_ This _ was natural. This was meant to be.

The plan was a noble one, if that was even the right word to use. Of course, it was pitched to him by a guilty, unnaturally emotional Markus and with the throb of Simon’s damaged insides beating in his head, but Simon was jaded at that point, used to risk, to failure, to adventure, to injury. He wouldn’t believe it till he saw it, though still found himself walking in time with Markus himself, who was clad in streetwear yet looked so prominent, so ethereal, a term never ever used to describe androids, if Simon recalled correctly.

As Markus called upon his fleets of androids, all of which fell in line without question, seeing Jericho’s truth, and no doubt feeling that magnetic swell toward the leading android, Markus became something beyond human. Humans weren’t ethereal; they were real and present, emotional and unpredictable, angry and soft, dirty and gritty.

Sometimes Simon hated them. He hated how inconsiderate they were, completely ignorant of their own significance and worth to those around them. He hated how they gave into their vices, how they swam in drugs, how they took and took and took.

But he couldn’t hate them, not when they were walking this line. Simon put himself not in North’s shoes, shoes of ultimate rage and betrayal, and not in Josh’s, encased in swampy sympathy and gentility that sometimes blinded him. 

Simon, in that moment, even avoided Markus’ views regarding humanity, that it was something we all could share in together, something we could bond over and engross to levels unknown. No, Simon didn’t want humanity. He wanted that energy Markus radiated, something  _ different _ . Simon wanted to coexist differently, to celebrate differences, to accept them, to mend old wounds, to show the humans that they,  _ he _ , could heal and move on in far greater leaps and bounds.

Simon didn’t want to be held down by what humanity had done to him. He wanted to move beyond it, like Markus. He wanted to “kill them with kindness,” or so humans tended to say.

So he walked next to Markus with purpose all his own, a purpose he hoped would meld with their leader’s, because he’d been the one to inspire it in the first place.

He should tell him that. Simon needed to tell Markus what it all meant to him.

They rounded the corner into a particularly common human emotion: hostility. They disguised it as anger, but any android who’d spent time interacting with humanity knew well anger boiled down to hurt, frustration, or fear. Judging by the way the fully automatic guns and heavy metal shields twitched in their hands, it was the latter.

Markus handled it with eloquence and that serene determination only he could master. And they reacted to it with more hostility, more fear. Simon wondered if the androids standing in rows behind them felt their throats closing like his was. Did they feel twitches of anxiety and nerves ramble and rake through their circuitry? If so, how did they manage to keep it so well under wraps?

Not one of them made a sound.

“Disperse immediately or we will open fire.”

That’s what the men with the guns and the bullets and the shields and the fear said, and Simon was instantly thrown into conflict again.

He felt fear, too. He knew he did. He imagined what blue blood would look like if it mixed with the snow and street slush of downtown Detroit. He imagined who would die and how it would happen, what wound would prove fatal. If he blinked fast enough in front of him were the discarded bodies of Jericho’s entire community, Markus in the front, just a pointless front of hope as easily toppled  as the telephone wires overhead.

But he was  _ tired _ of that fear. It wore down on him, seared like the old cigarette burns on his arms. If only his throat would stop restricting.

“Markus, they’re gonna kill us,” North warned. She was stressed. To her, Markus wasn’t grasping the situation’s gravity, and she had an in-character plan. “We have to attack, there’s more of us. We can take them.”

Josh didn’t even miss a beat in replying.

“We should just stand our ground, even if that means dying here.”

They were going to die either way.

And Simon was in pain. They’d done a piss-poor job of repairing him. That’s why Markus was so adamant in his staying at Jericho, where the vacuous, lonely steel walls could protect him from anymore bullets. But what would that have earned him, just more tormenting solitude to mull over, until the decrepit limbs of his people were broadcasted all over the news, leaving him forever alone, for good?

He was in pain. There was still a tiny leak in the casing around his Thirium pump he never told Markus about, even when he’d asked. He hadn’t been able to tie it off well; it hurt too badly. He might die soon, if he didn’t get around to fixing it properly.

“This is your last chance!”

Markus was turned away from Simon, who stood immediately behind him, but he picked up what he said nonetheless.

“I’m with you.”

And Markus,  _ Jericho _ , stood their ground as bullets started tearing into their troops. Blue blood looked less fluorescent and far more tragic when it was spattered against the gently falling precipitate. Simon learned that androids made no noise when they were shot to death; would he?

“We stay put. No matter what,” said Josh.

“We can’t let them slaughter us without fighting back,” said North.

_ I’m with you _ .

A shot went through Markus’ forearm. Simon watched it fly past his own field of vision. Neither android flinched. North grew increasingly more panicked as Josh tried not to look at his friends crumbling around him. This is what he wanted, after all.

“They’re gonna kill us all!” North finally exclaimed, which drew more attention than she seemed to be aware of, and which elicited a reaction that Simon practically lept to prevent.

Markus started moving forward, into the forefront, the crossfires. Like one collective  _ something _ , beyond human, android, basic comprehension, he moved his wiring and muscle structure and synthetic fibres forward without the slightest notion of fear. All those stories lit up in the snowy sunshine, the ones embedded into his skin, and Simon felt his throat burst the second Markus buckled, having been shot in the stomach.

And everyone scattered.

Every android backing Markus turned on their heels and fled as they were drowned in a hail of ammunition. They were dark streaks of motion in android eyes, barely traceable, but Simon couldn’t be bothered. Markus was laying, eyes closed, in a pool of blue fluid and shattered hopes, and no one would let Simon through.

“Simon, you can’t!” Josh wailed, wrapping his long arms around his middle and pulling. “They decided, we can’t risk it-”

But Simon, powering through the tearing feeling in his chest, sent his shoulder and elbow into Josh’s chin, knocking him away, just as North moved to cover them both. Simon needed to break through. Jericho needed the figurehead. They needed the push, needed the change, the motivation, the purpose. And now they were all letting it die right in front of them, miserably.

This was different. This wasn’t the Stratford tower. Markus didn’t need to be a sacrifice for whatever the hell this greater good was supposed to be. No, Simon wouldn’t let that happen. They’d drag him back. There were no parachutes, no buildings to jump from; they would manage somehow. And they’d do a better job of patching Markus up than they had Simon. They’d tie his wires tight. Fuck, they’d get him new ones.

A shot clipped Simon’s left leg, felt horribly familiar, and he buckled the moment another figure soared over his head and into the fray, towards a spread-eagle Markus.

_ John. _

The men with the guns and fear beat John to death the second John pried them off of Markus. His cheek shattered after two strikes of the batton. His middle was torn apart, wires exposed and spilling blue, by point-blank bullets. They stomped off his right arm. They shot him in the head.

North, Josh, and Simon managed to drag Markus away.

John was made the sacrifice, and Simon couldn’t feel his leg again, so he stared at Markus’ depleting LED until he collapsed into the snow himself just behind an android parking station. His eyes stayed peeled back, the blue now a cold hue, and he heard North shout his name as his regulator pump gave a few languid, slow beats.

He’d be the sacrifice again, if it meant Markus would make it back, if it showed humanity that he’d healed, that he’d made it past his horrors. He’d do it again and again and again. He’d just be the ocean, keep giving and giving, kill them with kindness. The way the snow blew around his ears in the November wind sounded like the shoreline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story may take a bit longer to finish than my previous one due to school obligations, but I'll do my best!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've finished this very early in the morning, so I'm sorry if it's riddled with typos. I'll fix what I see in time. I hope you enjoy some furthering of Simon and Markus' development. I'm deviating a bit from canon here, in a good way :) feedback is greatly appreciated!

**3 - November 6, 2038**

 

Simon was never one for pestering. He’d seen enough loss, pent up emotions, and distress to know that prodding someone for details, especially the curious sort, was invasive and uncomfortable. That’s why he never bothered North, no matter how badly he wanted to, no matter the pull he felt toward her, given her trauma and how she wore it on her sleeve,  _ owned _ it. He kept his mouth shut.

Markus, upon arrival, didn’t seem to understand this.

Maybe it was because earning Simon’s trust had been so easy, that and his stare wasn’t nearly as harsh as North’s. Maybe his pale complexion, feathery hair, and ghostly-lit eyes formed a composite equatable to trust. Maybe he was just physically closest to Simon later that evening, after Josh and Markus had spent an hour or so mapping out the ins and outs of their upcoming heist. Both had separate knowledge of the layout and combined it to form a whole; it was impressive.

“We shouldn’t bring any more people than necessary,” Josh advised, flicking his eyes to the room’s occupants. Markus seemed to agree. But, then again, his jaw was always set firm like that, cautious in a commanding, brooding sort of way.

“You three? You all seem capable.”

It was a compliment, sure, but Simon took it more as a note of condemnation. That conflict was still rampaging, two forces of “who the hell is he to call the shots” and “I’m so tired of exhausting myself, waiting to die,” and it showed no signs of ceasing. 

“Of course,” North answered for them, rising from her indolent seat on the floor to a stance of red-hot motivation that matched the exit signs somehow still lit up and the shade of her hair. Markus nodded to her in acknowledgment, and like that it was decided. Simon was forced to take Markus as a leader, as a figurehead of guidance, was forced to place his terminally ill trust in someone he couldn’t even understand, let alone comprehend confiding in. 

Maybe it was a good thing, though, to have the decision made for him; he’d always been of the turbulent sort.

North and Josh filtered out of the room, a small office sliced out of the leftmost corner of the hull. Its front wall was amess with old computer monitors, buttons never fiddled with and alarms never sounded. It was a mess of technology left to rot, and sometimes Simon thought it to be creepy. Unnerving.

“They’re careless with their own creation,” Markus chimed in, approaching Simon almost silently as the latter stared at this monument to the past.

“I like to think they just move too quickly,” Simon retorted. He didn’t know where the sympathy came from. Simon hated humanity, sometimes. “Too quickly from new idea to new invention, reaching too far.”

“Nothing, no  _ one _ , has ever stood up to them before. That’s the problem, the problem with humanity.”

There was scorn in his expression, a flash of emotion that immediately looked incorrect in its being there. He was scorned. He was angry, a start to Markus’ story Simon pledged to learn.

“It must be hard, living here,” Markus added, after a lengthy, languid moment had passed, in which Simon noticed he’d stopped blinking. He’d been standing and staring so long he was growing stiff.

“I...I suppose. It’s not lighthearted, if that’s what you mean,” Simon admitted, turning on his heels to watch Markus walk towards the wall of buttons and screens and dials, hands outstretched just a little, prompting Simon to wonder how advanced the sensory pads there were. 

“You’re all dying.”

They didn’t need the reminder.

“Everyone here...they came from a bad start,” he continued, rattling off tragic observations. Jericho learned to be  blasé about it all, at that point.

“The one, she was badly burned, her hair had stopped growing…” he described, still touching the dials, probably feeling their ridges with his prototype hands. Simon was growing bitter.

“...she died. She held my hand, and she just shut off.”

He knew immediately who Markus was speaking of, an android who’d stumbled into Jericho just last week. Her skin projection was failing, she was bald, no eyelashes or eyebrows, she’d been beaten and raped and burned by her previous family, and was a hopelessly old model. They couldn’t help her. Her voice was so small Simon could hardly tell what she wanted, life or death, or just something in between that was a little less painful.

“She was very sick,” Simon commented. There was a twinge in his chest, something he started identifying as sorrow only recently, and he hoped Markus couldn’t see it, hoped Markus would let him go without further questioning. But there was no allotted space for optimism anymore.

“What about you?”

Outside, Jericho’s populus were questioning North and Josh about the plans they’d fashioned.

“What about me?”

They looked excited for the first time in Simon’s memory.

“Everyone has a story here. What’s yours?”

It was a funny question, even beyond the irony of Markus being the one to ask it. It was funny because Simon couldn’t explain why he remembered all that he did; when androids were reset, that was supposed to be it. Why his memory held so firmly to those dreary, defining memories of his was something Simon couldn’t explain, and certainly beyond the PL600 capacities.

In short, there was a lot he could tell Markus. But should he?

“First I belonged to a drug addict, who overdosed. Then a strip club bouncer. Then a cosmetologist who doubled as a dominatrix in her spare time. Then an alcoholic, who lived in a big house all alone. And then I ended up here.”

Suddenly, Markus looked a little less disdainful and more calculating, like Simon was code and all his memories were supposed to amount to one image, but the image was glitching.

“You ran away?”

“I guess you could say that,” Simon remarked. The sound of shattering glass tinkled in his ears. The crunch of bone and muscle tissue on concrete made his breathing simulation hitch.

“Why did you run?”

If Simon couldn’t bring himself to tell North about his experiences with the alcoholic in the architect’s mansion, his experience in the room with sky blue curtains and sleek, black hardwood that dented his knees, he knew he couldn’t tell Markus. There was a twinge in his lips, the start of a cadence in his throat, but the fear ate it up, the same fear that encircled Jericho, the fear that begged to be broken, the fear drawn in blackened burn marks up and down Simon’s arms.

“I’d seen enough of humanity. I’d grown not to like them.”

No, Simon hadn’t encountered a human he’d liked since then man who lived near the lake, and that was so long ago. It was hard to maintain optimism in the face of all those years and all that torture, yet the memory of those windy, lakeside shores and poorly made Indie films shone a light through the rumble, through the murky waters. He’d been happy before; he hadn’t forgotten how.

“And Jericho? Why here?” Markus inquired. This had to be a model-specific feature of his, this ability to have others’ defenses crumble around you, to win their hearts and their secrets. Fittingly, Simon answered honestly.

“I like the water.”

Markus wanted more. Simon could see it in the contortions of his expression, want barely hidden by polite consideration. In order to get anything else out of him, Markus would have to relent and reveal more about himself, but something told Simon that to ask for such was a lost cause.

“I doubt you’ll tell me where you’re from,” he added, just as he planned to turn to leave. North was summoning him, pointing frantically to one of the empty Cyberlife crates with her usual enraptured but fleeting interest.

Markus shook his head. “It’s not important right now.”

Simon was definitely right: there wasn’t as much hurt under his skin as there was scorn, anger, and frustration. The feeling of being cheated, of trying hard to do the right thing and failing either way. It wasn’t a uniquely human thing; Markus was a living testament to that. But, in an attempt to show him how to monitor one’s curiosity, to show restraint, the sort which Simon had not only been programmed with but had become an integral part of his personality, he didn’t press. He would find out in time.

“I’m glad to be here, though,” Markus added, a stark sentence against what Simon was quickly starting to consider a bleak exchange. It lifted his spirits, and he acted with sincerity, touching a hand down on Markus’ shoulder.

“We’re glad to have you. All of us.”

 

**\- November 9, 2038**

 

Simon came around four and a half hours after being dragged back to Jericho, a mess of tangled embarrassment and limbs that were barely holding on, barely attached, barely pumping Thirium. The pulse thumped in his head. He was aware of nothing and everything at the same time: he was in a curtained-off room in the hull; he was in a ethereal, ghostly-lit sunscape. He’d nearly bled to death hours earlier; he’d been so close to that final release, that final push off of the harbor, into the sea.

He didn’t see Markus for forty-two and a half minutes following his resuming of consciousness. He spent the time pretending he couldn’t hear the non-wounded passersby and brushing North’s concerns away, staring intently at the colors that the monitors and Cyberlife crates drew in the ceiling above him. A lot of blue, a lot of white, a lot of waiting.

His audio rollback and recognition systems were malfunctioning, otherwise he would’ve sensed Markus’ steps from hundreds of feet away. But instead Simon nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of Jericho’s recently shot, somehow still fearless leader pulling shut the medical curtains and looking Simon dead in the eyes, prompting the latter to shoot into a sitting position. It was excruciating.

“Don’t,” Markus whispered, in a soft, unnatural cadence. He broke into a short run to Simon’s bedside, eyebrows bunched.

“I...I thought you’d left…”

“I left Josh in charge of roll call,” he assured, pulling from behind him a chair, but never breaking his expression. “For the time being.”

“I’m sure he loves that,” Simon chided. His hand felt the space above his regulator pump and he winced. It was still tender there. The stitches they’d sewn in were not of Cyberlife’s highest technological quality.

“He can deal.”

There was a thick, bulbous lump in Markus’ shoulder. They’d plugged the hole where that initial bullet had grazed on by. And there was a large wad of bandages attached to his chest where that near fatal shot had struck. There was blue, glowing, fluorescent, under the thin fabric of his shirt, and Markus looked painfully mortal, overwhelmingly fragile.

Simon was touching Markus’ hands before he could think better of it, before he could remember how mad Markus was going to be with him. He shouldn’t have come and was in an even worse state of disrepair than before, just like Markus had predicted, so how was Simon supposed to relay that he didn’t regret coming? That he was  _ glad _ to have gotten the chance to support Jericho?

Through touch. That’s what Simon’s exhaustion-deluded brain decided upon.

“I told you to stay here,” Markus stated, almost absently. He was watching Simon’s fingers wrap around his own, in which there wasn’t a twitch of motion or energy. He was stagnant.

“I knew something like that would happen. I...but I thought…”

Simon swallowed. “We all thought they’d understand a little better than they did. We were hopeful.”

Markus grimaced, blinking, not moving his hand still.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Simon tried, meaning it, sort of. Trying to mean it.

“Thirteen of us died. They just shot, like it was nothing. We mean nothing to them.”

He was sounding like North, a dangerous subject to be compared to, despite her abundance of love and compassion, and Simon squeezed his hand to stop him from talking like that. It was making that pulsing in his head all the louder.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Markus said again, this time shaking his head. “You could have been killed-”

“ _ I _ could have been killed?” Simon exclaimed, the noise dying halfway out of his throat but conveying its meaning all the same. “You broke from the group. They shot  _ you _ first.”

But then there was a twitch in Markus, a buzz of movement, and Simon knew he struck a nerve.

“Does it still hurt?” Simon inquired, suddenly cautious. His eyes wandered across the expanse of Markus’ chest, full, complete, yet littered with human-made flaws, broken pieces of people’s finest creation in the form of scars, scrapes, burns, and dents. Al those stories still only partially told.

“No. Not really,” he answered, eyes softening so quickly Simon watched Markus’ pupils dilate before him. Finally his hand reciprocated, and Simon felt the twinge of receding skin, felt the warmth of the projection fade away to smooth, cool plasteel. Simon’s pulse thumped harder.

“I didn’t think John would do that,” he admitted, sounding as though he was heaving a hundred pound weight off his chest. And as Simon blinked through those fresh memories, broken jaws, shattered optical units, dying words, blue blood, a shocking, highly necessary sacrifice.

“Neither did I.”

And it was making sense, that downcast look on Markus’ face. It was shame, guilt, loss, three things that contorted to riddle ones core with pain almost impossible to be resolved. That’s why he was fidgeting, making tiny circles in the now fully exposed plasteel of Simon’s hand, teasing the glowing blue lights there. It was sending waves through Simon’s arm and into his chest, where his damaged wiring could hardly handle it.

“I just…”Markus tried. Simon gave him time to find his words, never demanding that intrepid facade he put on in front of Jericho’s populous. He admired it, of course, but was aware of its falsity. Hell, he’d dedicated himself to understanding its ins and outs, and had made good work of it so far.

Markus was a ball of inferiorities, a spherical thing with jagged spears in its side that rolled toward success in pain because it’d never been given another course to travel. Markus had never been given options, or at least he’d never taken them. A privileged life had been ripped out from under his feet, which were then nailed to one path the very next day, the second after he’d attached new legs, found new eyes, new ears, and a Thirium pump compatible to Simon’s own.

That was the story. Markus had seen loss, too. He’d even caused it, in a way, and bore that burden on his shoulders. Markus’ hands, hands that could have been stained with paint rather than his friends’ blue blood, bore the scars of his own rebirth, a beautiful and tragic and Herculean feat all its own.

“I can’t do this,” he said, prompting Simon to stop scanning and watch as a tear made its way down Markus’ cheek. It looked foreign. Simon worried the moisture would damage the RK200, until he remembered the damage had already been done.

He could tell Markus that they needed him, too, that John sacrificed himself for their leader because Jericho’s figurehead was the sole reason they’d managed anything at all, that Simon had only been inspired to stop hating humanity so much when Markus came around, but Markus wouldn’t have any of that. He needed honesty, even if it was brutal, and most things were just that nowadays.

“I think you have to,” he admitted. “We all do.”

Markus’ skin receded completely, revealing the same shade of pure, colorless material that made all androids, and Simon watched as the wiring in both their wrists bloomed to life, casting hues of neon blue on the walls, on the monitors, on their wounds and scars. The heat tingled Simon’s burns, soothed the shot he’d taken to the leg, eased the tension surrounding his regulator.

And there was energy circulating between them, the likes of which Simon had never experienced. He thought he’d reached the height of such an exchange just that morning when he’d managed somehow to crawl out of the same medical cot to accompany Markus downtown, but was sorely mistaken. This was huge, inexplicable, fiery and hard to take. Markus was in Simon’s head, watching the binary flood on past with wide, all-seeing eyes. He was a goldenrod beacon in a sea of navy, cornflower, cobalt, the sky, the ocean, the LED Simon had never bothered to remove. He drew Simon in, knew everything at once, assuaged everything at once, and touched everything of Simon  _ all at once _ .

_ DON’T SCARE ME LIKE THAT AGAIN. PLEASE. _

Markus was taking the time to reprimand Simon even in the middle of their interfacing. The speech rang not just in his ears, either, but in his chest, from his toes to his ears. He felt the words as though he’d thought them himself.

_ PROMISE ME YOU WON’T LEAVE. THEN WE’RE EVEN. _

The thought of Markus leaving, by a bullet of by his own independent choice, haunted Simon since the day Jericho’s savior fell from the ceiling. This was a good of a time as any to demand this of him, considering the circumstances.

Markus answered when he kissed Simon, leaning towards him in another spatial dimension entirely, and closing his lips around Simon’s. Immediately the skin there went white, ultra-sensitive and glowing.

_ PROMISE. _

They had time. They had a few minutes, a few seconds, a moment to spend in that different, separate space, a connectivity between machines designed to be technical and bland but grew anyways into a beautiful blend of technology and morality, of sensuality, of life and death and whatever happened in between in. So when Simon’s hands dug into Markus’ shirt, when Markus sighed against the taut skin of Simon’s neck, neither knew in what world they were operating, only that they needed to do so, and they might be dead come morning, anyways.

Besides, the harbor was closing in fast. Simon wanted to meet it with someone at his side. He was tired of sailing solo.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise to resolve anything you may find disingenuous in the characters. I have to set up the conflict between them early but have to wait ages to formally resolve it because of the wacky timeline of this story. Also, in terms of the actual dates, I tend to imagine the progression of these events as much more spaced out, especially due to the amount of character development I'm including. The dates are mainly there to help you guys establish an order. Thanks for reading! ~

 

 

**4 - November 6, 2038**

 

Simon was overjoyed that his model was athletically inclined, even in the slightest. There wasn’t any tension in his joints when he made the twenty foot drop from shipping crate to shipping crate with Josh practically clipping his heels all the while. All the tension, no doubt, was found in  _ him _ , in all the words of warning and anxiety Josh kept murmuring. North had to shut him up about eleven minutes into their venture.

Markus seemed impressed with Simon and Josh when they followed through on their word and joined him in the Cyberlife infiltration. Obviously he’d had full faith in North; the energy she kept dispersing just by standing there, bouncing up and down and never really shutting up, not unless stealth was required, definitely gave her quick allegiance away. So it gave an extra pump in Simon’s step to be considered in such high regard, drove him to push a little harder physically than was expected of an ordinary PL600.

Despite this, however, Simon was certainly okay with watching Markus take down that drone overhead. The noise it made caused the whole group to grit their teeth and watch, tense, as Markus wriggled and swerved with the device in the air. Simon fought the urge to extend his hands, to build a net into which Markus could fall, just as the man of the hour ripped the battery from the machine and landed in a neat squat on the pavement. Silent.

Silent, but evidently a little winded.

“You okay?” Simon voiced, pattering through the rain-slick ground to meet Markus.

“Y-yeah, I’m fine,” he sighed, partially to himself, but loud enough that Simon caught the surprise in his tone; this mission was risky, even to its orchestrator, and that fact was bemusing in its own right.

“Good job, Markus,” North added, with noteworthy sincerity, before the troop made it to the blessed crates, all placed in a perfect little semi-circle, as though this was destiny, or as though it was all too easy.

“Quick, open the other crates and fill your bags. Take as much as you can carry!” Simon advised. Feeling a little more vocal, anxious that the situation was aligning itself so well, he slotted his knife forcefully into the seam and hinge of the box and watched with relish as the blade cut down the middle of the Cyberlife logo.

Simon’s fingers squished into the bags of blue blood. It felt gelatinous in his hands, almost, more and more like a retail commodity the longer he stared at the label, the branding. Humans had made the androids’ very sustenance their product to be sold, and Simon could hear such a product thumping in his ears at the thought. He threw more and more into the backpack behind him, until the zipper wouldn’t shut and he could see the withered androids back at Jericho’s faces in his mind, glowing, for the first time, with genuine hope. Simon looked to Markus, if briefly, and smiled through his anger at this bedraggled life they were made to live.

How was it someone like him, riddled with betrayal and frustration, was able to do this? What really was Markus’ motivation? He didn’t smile, didn’t laugh, didn’t cry, nor really show his hand. He was just angry, and this was a way of coping.

In the middle of these intrusive thoughts, Simon’s motion detectors sounded off behind him, noting movement that did not belong to any of his accomplices. Slowly he raised his head and felt the others do the same.

An android stood where the Cyberlife crates ended. He wore a standard worker uniform, a black coat, striped with an orange color that determined his function, and a hat that cast dark, unknowing shadows on his face. He was a GJ500. He wasn’t Deviant.

“You are trespassing on private property,” he said, plain and programmed, before he started marching through the group toward Markus.

“Your presence constitutes a level two infraction. I will notify security.”

Markus’ eyes were wide, bugged out of his head. He didn’t look to anyone else for support, and Simon could practically see the magic of Markus’ never-before-seen model at work, pre-constructing the action sequences down to the very smallest detail, choosing an outcome that was best, with only milliseconds to do so. 

He also wondered how often Markus failed.

“John!” a new voice called, to Simon’s left. He caught the sheen of rain-slicked skin in the surveillance spotlights. “Goddamn machine…”

Simon hit the deck, huddling behind a crate practically entwined in Josh’s limbs, right as Markus launched himself towards John and dragged him backwards, stifling his protests and ramming his own eyes shut, hoping.  _ Hoping _ .

The disgruntled employee loomed closer. Markus told everyone through their wireless connection to stay put. So Simon put a stop to the jittering in his toes and waited, desperate to take part in that  _ hope _ , too. Josh had his shoulders pinned against the crate opposite Simon; North crouched dangerously close to the beam omitted from the Cyberlife worker’s flashlight, and Markus was behind him.

The footsteps slowed, looking, however passively, and his flashlight graced the outskirts of North’s hair, highlighted the ends not tucked behind her ears or pulled into her ponytail, before he gave up. His efforts and frustrations blew out of his chest in one loud exhale, and Simon was beginning to understand why humans sighed at all.

“First the drone, now this…just my luck.”

He was gone as quickly as he’d come. The four of them slowly stood up, taking in every angle before emerging in full, and Simon saw Markus gently move past this android known as John, who wore a stupefied, out of this world expression. Eyes focused on nothing, surely Markus had convinced him of something like he had so well with Jericho’s residents.

Uneager to converse with the almost snitching android, however, Simon watched as their leader of sorts hoisted himself atop a parking garage’s ledge and approached a storage unit, as tall as Markus was, and slid his blade down its side, too. He was more fluid and smooth in his motions, not as depraved as Simon’s breaking had been. There was control and dexterity in his hands, almost too much so.

Inside the larger unit were three androids. Lifeless. AP700s all lined up in a row, hair cut and trimmed in the same brown shade, nose sculpted in the same, firm fashion, and eyes designed to please and serve. They were swathed in Cyberlife’s signature neon blue hue, a tone of that color Simon always considered only appropriate for strip clubs and backwater bars in the parts of Detroit he hadn’t visited in a while. Not since he didn’t have to.

What prevented more hurt from bubbling in Simon’s gut, however, was what Markus did with these androids, who’d obviously never seen the light of day, hadn’t even started their existence if subserviency. Markus touched the center one’s hand; Simon could see his jaw working, forming words, no doubt of substantial meaning, for Simon had already gathered that Markus was not of the loquacious sort, and whatever came out of his mouth was concise and important.

And the android’s eyes fluttered. They blinked and searched in a way surely not intended by Cyberlife, eyelashes crashing together to catch a better view of the world they were thrust into. Simon, having wandered just beneath the ledge upon which Markus stood, could see the faint blip of a yellow LED break through the shroud of electric blue, a dose of thought and calculation in the midst of so much preprogrammed slavery. They were thinking. 

Markus drove him to think.

In no time at all the other two AP700s experienced that same ethereal birthing, thrust into a world designed to be off-limits to them but, by some miracle, was there’s for the taking. Markus murmured some instructions about locating Jericho, that much Simon could hear, before dropping down without a backwards glance at the lives he’d started. It would have been cold, had he not just blessed them, essentially, with independence, and he caught Simon’s aghast gaze when he touched back down. 

He didn’t say anything, though, and Simon went back to work, being vocal, giving instructions, because, in what seemed like forever ago, he’d run this show. It was the least he could do to play Markus’ right hand man, even if he took the role out of anxiety and fear for the power vested in that mystery model.

“That’s all we can carry, let’s go.”

Everyone obeyed, too, but from his periphery Simon watched as John stirred, wearing a new look of reflection that bounced off the rain-soaked pavement and carved shadows into his dark cheeks. He was probably realizing  _ so _ much.

“Take me with you.”

When he spoke, his cadence was completely different. Hesitant, thoughtful, pensive, even, as though weighing each and every option before him at once. Simon knew the feeling. Having been designed for basic childcare and household chores himself, to have such personal responsibility deposited on his shoulders was suffocating, to say the least.

“He’s on their side, we can’t trust him!” North hissed, laying a hand down on Markus’ arm, like physical proximity would drive home her point any better.

But the thumping in Simon’s abdomen and ears drove him to agree with North. This was high-risk enough as it was, their being there, and their narrow success in having gathered the supplies they’d managed. They couldn’t tempt fate. No matter how fascinating Markus’ performative conversion had been. 

“He took a risk for us,” Josh chimed on, eyeing Simon harshly. They didn’t often disagree. “We can’t just leave him here.”

But it wasn’t the matter of only John. The AP700s loomed, still unnamed, looking lost and in search of guidance. It must be harder, to have to live independently from the get-go, before even registering the desire to do so. Nevertheless, they couldn’t take them all. They were extensive in numbers as it was; to add four more would make the group swollen and destined for failure.

But Simon still watched Markus make the choice in his eyes. Flashes of outcomes and codes and scenarios. Landing on the wrong slot in the wheel, the slot Simon loathed.

“They come with us.”

North removed her grasp from Markus and fell in line with Simon, who immediately distanced himself from Josh and started longing for that position of authority again. Not that he knew how to handle it or deserved it, but this was all to rash and parlous, and Simon craved security again.

And, to make matters more precarious, John stated the following, “I know where you can find more spare parts.”

He acted before Markus could enact anymore control over him; it would a while before Simon understood where this anger at being replaced and put down came from.

“What do you mean?” he asked, nearing John, watching his liberated eyes flicker with his newly liberated speech.

“The trucks. They’re full of biocomponents.”

It took no Deviant thought-process to know where this would go, of course.

“They run on autopilot, but they can be driven manually with a key.”

Markus was inquiring about where this key was, and John was pointing to a security checkpoint on the other side of the storage lot, as if not understanding the danger he was tempting an obviously thrill-inclined Markus with. He capped the description of this elusive key by revealing the presence of two guards, human, who would have to either be neutralized or snuck past in order to gain access to these trucks, and Markus’ eyes, in all their heterochromatic glory, were full of stars.

Simon wouldn’t have it. Visions of capture and the fall of Jericho littered his head.

“This is suicide, Markus. Our bags are full. We got what we came for, let’s go before they catch us.”

There was a conflict, of course, raging behind those vestiges of horror. The trucks sounded like a gold mine, a holy land, the only way each occupant of Jericho had any chance of continued survival. But those very same occupants would all be dead on the spot should any one of their team get captured; they’d be reset, their memories salvaged and read through, and Jericho would be sunk in the lake in which it stood. The community Simon helped fashion would go under.

Additionally, the quick alliance between North and Simon dissolved. She practically spat her rebuttal in his face,

“This is a truck full of spare parts...there’d be enough for all of us.”

leaving a spot available for Josh to rejoin his usual post as Simon’s backup.

“And if we get killed, our people will have nothing. We can’t take that chance, it’s too risky!”

Simon had a strained memory of taking care of a young girl. He thought he had red hair. He read to this girl an abridged version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, years ago, and finally understood the dilemma under which the main character was placed.

Yet, according to that day’s theme, Markus made the decision on his own, seemingly unaffected by the debate raging on before him. And he went alone, against North’s valiant yet suspicious wishes, and Simon watched him take long, Olympian-esque strides toward the security checkpoint, resigning himself to ultimate failure and hopelessness.

These are the thought he dwelled upon for nearly five minutes. They swam in his head and reminded him of what it felt like to under the cigarettes of the strip club bouncer, who also marked the last times Simon had been around those sketchy parts of the city he never could escape. There was no point in struggling. He could never muster up a voice, and there was always someone who wielded the control better than he could. Simon let the rain thunder in his ears and drip into his optical units as Josh and North raged in whispers behind him, spectated by John and the AP700s, who he knew he would have to teach and inspire if they ever made it back to that cherished shipyard.

Markus emerged from the security building the second Simon started to get reckless and contemplated going in after him; the motion to do so died in his heels as Markus sprinted their way.

“Did you get it?” North flung herself in his direction, and Markus held up a rectangular white chip, wet and sleek and looking like it was hardly worth the trouble.

“Nice.”

They entered the truck in one swoop, North sitting in the passenger’s seat and Simon taking the space behind Markus. All were silent. All stared at the blackened insides of the security checkpoint, and Simon couldn’t help but notice the guards, guns and flashlights up, searching the perimeter for the culprit. 

Markus hadn’t killed them. Any of them.

That damned conflict raged in Simon’s mind as they cruised home, never getting stop, hardly even landing any red lights, and eventually found his forehead pressed against the back of Markus’ seat. Coming down from the adrenaline of the night aside, disbelief was running rampant, that and the knowledge that he’d never be able to pull off a stunt like that, even if Jericho’s populous could ever trust him enough to let him try.

Only when they started unloading the blue blood and spare parts into Jericho and Simon say pure, unobstructed joy in the eyes of those androids for the first time in his life did he understand it was worth it. Depressing and self-deprecating, yes, but Jericho had never been about him. So he handed loads and loads of spare optical and auditory units, still wrapped and encased directly from Cyberlife, to the healthiest of Deviants to carry inside. He watched a real-life android clinic sprout before him, and his heart grew full. 

Simon even waited to see any joy cast itself across Markus’ features, but as the last of the supplies were brought inside, as the cheers of Deviants rang louder than ever, as LEDs ran a brighter, more oceanic blue than he cold ever recall, as Lucy herself smiled in awe, Markus was nowhere to be found. Thus, Simon resigned his authority in Jericho over to a stranger who’d done so much yet celebrated so little.

 

**\- November 7, 2038**

 

Simon was second to Markus again when they went to the Stratford Tower, but made himself be okay with it. Trust was cresting like the tides, and the pull toward Markus was stronger than expected.

Josh asked him about his demeanor, actually, as they waited in the maintenance lift for Markus to summon them upstairs. He probably looked ridiculous, really, a Deviant android infiltrating a top-executive office building willingly wearing a yellow JB300 uniform. Simon brushed the concerns aside, let his trust in his first-in-command wash over him, and Josh took the moment of unusual silence to comment on how the goldenrod shade washed Simon out, who punched the PJ500 in amused retaliation.

The amusement fluttered, if only for a second, when they caught glance of North and Markus in uniform, ensembles neither had ever been seen in, even during their non-Deviant days. North looked fidgety in her baseball cap, and Markus stretched out the fabric surrounding his thighs and shoulders.

Simon handed the handcrafted explosive to Markus with caution, not nearly as confident in his own engineering skills as the rest of the team was, and Markus took not only the device but Simon’s hand, briefly, in his own. It was supposed to be a note of determination, but Simon’s touch receptors surge, and several cooling protocols alert him of the danger in the corner of his vision. He whisks them away, enjoying the moment.

“Let’s do this,” Markus announced, and Simon’s hand is freezing when he pulls away.

When the lock melts under the sparks and fire of Simon’s concentrated heat-incineration device, the grin Markus shoots him is as warm as the molten stainless-steel finished door knob.

The plan is alarmingly simple, which probably prompted Josh to ask “how the hell” Simon was okay with it. The latter didn’t have the heart to tell him of the worries and terrors grappling together in his imagination, mostly because to do so would admit those very worries and terrors to the side of Simon that remained forcefully ignorant of them. He couldn’t admit his fear because he’d already vested too much trust in Markus and couldn’t just back out, not after spending thirty-two consecutive hours creating the device that allowed them passage through the maintenance backroads of the Stratford Tower. No way.

He had to keep earning his place at Jericho, and this was a sure-fire way of doing so.

When the four of them crouched in that tight doorway, Josh saw the way Markus was analyzing the scene before them, and he and North embarked on a very typical contrempts of ideologies.

“No killing. We can’t take any human lives.”

“Our cause is more important than the lives of two guards.”

Both were valid points. So, Simon quenched the conflict raging in his head the best way he knew how: opening a dialogue.

“What do you wanna do, Markus?”

Markus appreciated being given the choice, and clearly chose to disregard North’s fiery temperament. Simon didn’t know whether he was happy about it or not.

Only Simon’s spatial and motion sensors could paint him a picture of what was happening beyond their secluded doorway corner, that and North’s hissing and gritting of her teeth. Markus drew his gun and was ordering the guards to the right. And then there were two strikes, two thuds, Markus was directing his crew to advance, and, in tandem, North and Simon were hiding the bodies from view behind their desk.

The broadcast room was in sight. The thrill of success, nearly tangible, was on Simon’s tongue. He knew it was preemptive, but the determined cocking of their guns and the way they all carried themselves, as though not the suppressed people, not the ones who were crawling in agony towards basic rights and freedoms, was enough to get anyone excited.

There was panic in the broadcast room; androids and humans alike scrambled at the sight of Jericho’s disruption, guns forward and dangerous. No one argued, and as Simon made a beeline for the main control panel, a swarm of buttons and touchpads underneath their main monitor, Markus ordered the three operating androids to the back breakroom. North and Josh huddled everyone else back into the corner, held them there for safe-keeping. 

Simon’s fingers flew across the keyboard, switching off the station’s wireless connections to local broadcast agencies and programs and rerouting them all back to Stratford to adjust the camera feed. They needed a live broadcast, without any rotation of commercials or time stamps. 

He was drawn away from his work only by the noise of shoes sliding against tile, accompanied by several thuds and screams. Careening his head to face to commotion, Simon watched as a man at least four inches shorter than he scramble on his knees to get away from the broadcast room, and the familiar look of looming decision in Markus’ eyes. His gun was aimed for his head; everyone knew he wouldn’t miss if he fired.

“Shoot him, Markus!”

“Don’t kill him!”

“He’ll hit the alarm, do it!”

Simon hoped he made the right choice.

He never fired, just let the desperate man slide through the first set of automatic doors with naught but sweat staining his shirt. All logic told Simon to have let him scrape by was wrong, but had human blood be shed, he wondered how much potential sympathy from the public would have been swiped from Jericho’s grasp.

There were too many consequences to calculate.

“I hope you didn’t just get us all killed…” North growled, rage tinging the ends of her syllables red.

There wasn’t time to think of that. Simon needed to finish the camera feed configurations. Markus marched into the space between himself and Josh, who waited for Simon to give him the go-ahead. And once the figure of Markus, recorded by the camera embedded in the monitor, appeared in the livestream screen beneath Simon, he gave them both a telling nod.

Before beginning, however, Simon saw North exchange a few words with Markus with that same suspicious gleam in her eye, leaving Simon to wonder if Markus gave her that same warmth he did him, and if she was reminiscent of ice when he pulled away.

And, in a blip of self-indulgence and jealousy Simon would never live down, he found a reason to speak to Markus, his last exchange before potentially changing every androids’ future for better or for worse,

“Markus, your face.”

Markus melded into plasteel, colorless and sleek, and Simon fell backwards into the control panel, in awe not only of his words and the ways in which he mobilized them, but how he looked in doing so.

Until Jericho, Simon had always thought, because he’d always been told, that androids were the same. Despite their appearances, models, and programming, there were the same groundwork at their core and deserved no distinguishing. The color of their innerworkings, the silvery-white plasteel and seamless metal work, attested to that. How could anything so abundant in nothing be different, let alone special?

Jericho had begun to teach him otherwise. He marveled at how each android not only had stories of sorrow and strength to share, at every turn, but how they’d adapted to their mental and physical abuse so well. They walked without functioning legs, spoke without lower jaws, without suitable auditory processing systems, and felt joy like humans did. There was no way they were all the same; had that been true, Josh and North would have nothing to disagree over.

Markus, however, was a perfected study in this observation. Never, despite watching so many androids’ skin projections fail in their final days, had Simon seen an android constructed as Markus was. His face moved with more expression and elegance than was necessary for any android, at least one employed to something like lowly housework. 

“We are no longer machines.”

Triangular cheeks led into a prominent chin, a steep brow gave way to dual colored irises, and angular cheekbones led to a pair of full lips, below a broad, sculpturous nose, all somehow full of life without their human coloring. 

“Therefore, we ask that you grant us the rights that we’re entitled to.”

His voice was pitched in a centerfold, never peaking nor cowering at the weight of his own words, derived from a mind that had seen the incline and returned unscathed.

“We ask that you recognize our dignity, our hopes, and our rights.”

How could the humans ignore this emblem of android intelligence, empathy, capability, and worth? They’d taken care to design him this way, so much like them that to androids he seemed unearthly, so surely he would resonate. 

“Together, we can live in peace and build a better future, for humans and androids.”

He was resonating with Simon. So much so that Simon’s fingers were digging into the side of the control panel for support. 

“You gave us life. And now the time has come for you to give us freedom.”

He was enthralled, absorbed in a swell of heat so fierce that it sent his audio processors askew, and his HUD was clouded with intrapersonal software warnings that he let fade into oblivion. He chewed his lip and watched, wondering what he did to deserve to be there.

And then the guards burst through the door, just a flicker of heavy machinery and armor on the security feed on the panel Simon clutched, and he was reminded of what he did to be there, besides Jericho’s literal savior incarnate: he’d risked his life.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello strangers! I am so sorry for not updating in so many months. School and life in general (though it's going rather well) have definitely gotten away from me. I do plan on continuing this story, however, and I hope you'll stick around for the ride! Thank you for the support thus far. This installment is entirely separate from canon and all emotional development.

**5 - November 6, 2038**

 

There were many levels of Jericho’s hull. Fortunately, only a few of them were decrepit and sunken-in, beyond practical repair, when Markus fell through the ceiling. One could still walk the perimeter nearly one hundred feet above the floor on scantily held together metal bridges and walkways. Jericho stored a lot of supplies here; clothes, Thirium, whatever documentation came with each android proving their identity, the works.

It also served as an ideal place for solitude, which Markus learned quite quickly.

Simon found him around two hours after returning back with the Cyberlife haul, having managed to pry himself away from the throngs of grateful residents only by promising to find the haul’s orchestrator. It was an empty oath, really, because even if Simon found him, he doubted he wanted to talk, yet if he did, Simon planned on having him all to himself.

He had questions for Markus. He couldn’t get the image of those living, breathing guards searching the darkness blindly out of his mind.

Markus stood over the documents Simon had spent the last weeks accumulating: detailed reports of Cyberlife manufacturing schedules, models that were up for reproduction, redesign, new prototypes, and the extirpation of entire android series. His back was turned to Simon, perched underneath a desk light whose light bulb flickered uncomfortably, and even from the distance at which he stood, Simon could see the heading of Markus’ current read:

PL100 --> PL600

Status: DISCONTINUED

Somewhere along the line, however, Markus heard Simon’s approach and turned, papers still grasped in his hand. He’d taken off the black overshirt he’d worn to the Cyberlife warehouse and was now clad in white. Simon, however, had yet to shake the rainwater from his hair.

“They’re discontinuing your model, and series,” he declared, as though it was a fleeting news headline, lost in the shuffle again.

“Yeah...I’m aware,” Simon answered, rather gruffly. He’d done research on the topic. The last of the PL series was to be issued this month. They were falling behind the AP and AX series, which Simon realized explained a lot of the resentment he unfairly felt towards those androids whom Markus had taken the time to convert that night. They really did look a lot more efficient, though, and had a far more attractive and symmetrical facial structure than he’d been gifted.

“You think it has anything to do with that PL Deviant? The one who held that young girl hostage?”

Simon recalled the newsreel from that August morning. It was soon after he’d found Jericho himself. Him and the other four whole occupants of the refuge gathered around their ancient television and watched as, after they declared the little girl safe, the reporters discussed the major dip in the Cyberlife stock and predicted the deduction of sales in all house-working android models. It was a heartless analysis, and it didn’t help his case to have his own likeness, somehow so different yet so similar, projected across every screen in Detroit.

“Maybe. Didn’t  _ help _ PL sales, that’s for sure,” he admitted, almost contemptuously. There was a commotion downstairs, sounded as though someone had cracked a case of Thirium open but had done so sloppily, thus spilling the plastic packages on the floor. Josh would help clean it up.

“They’ve been asking for you, you know,” he added, once Markus placed the documents about Simon’s kind down, a delicate motion Simon had yet to see from him. “They want to thank you again.”

“I’m just helping them get back on their feet,” he responded, taking a pause to note the irony in his sentence. “Literally and figuratively, I guess.”

This new brand of modesty didn’t fit the puzzle of Markus. It felt jagged compared to the other pieces of him that Simon had collected, which caused him to press a little.

“You’ve done a lot more than that. I...I haven’t seen them this happy before.”

Simon, having entered the ovular office-like room of Jericho’s upper barracks, leaned against the wall opposite Markus, who was only partially facing him now. His eyes were scanning everything, still. The processing power behind his optical units must be lightning quick, pre-programmed with a sort of wisdom Simon could never know.

“They’re beaten down. Feeling better, feeling more like a  _ whole _ , is the first step to stop feeling broken.”

It was a truth Simon wouldn’t deny, but would certainly pry its origins. To make claims about brokenness had to mean something.

“And you?” he asked, crossing his arms, trying to look leisurely, but knowing the blipping yellow of his LED gave him away. “You’re  _ not _ beaten down?”

Finally, he captured Markus’ attention. Maybe he would’ve felt intrusive, impolite, even, in asking such a weighted question, but he’d done nothing but follow and praise Markus for that whole evening and night. This would make them even. It may even salvage some of that power dynamic he’d abdicated.

“That’s...not the right word for it, I guess,” were Markus’ choice words. His stare moved from the documents to the posters and clippings hung along the windows; pictures from beachside travel magazines, local android news, and personal photographs of Simon’s had been accumulating here for weeks. Suddenly self-conscious, Simon wondered just how much they revealed about him. 

“What’s  _ it _ ?”

There was a picture of Kruse Park hanging on a cork board, one of Simon’s favorite shots ever taken by the man who made movies by the lake. The sky was orange and the lake’s blue green bounced off the shore nicely, framed the horizon line in a glow that drew hazy outlines around seagull silhouettes in between evening cirrus clouds. Markus was staring at it.

“Blame. Blame for something that I...that I didn’t mean to do,” he relinquished. “But I’m not beaten down about it.”

Blame was a satisfactory motivation for a revenge story, but Markus was too right-ways for his life goal to be one of vengeance. That was short-sighted. There had to be a deeper level he was prohibiting access to.

“Then how do you feel about it?”

Androids were always an easy target upon which one could pin blame. They weren’t allowed to defend ourselves in any situation of law and order; only androids with the occasional benevolent owner managed to avoid shutdown in the midst of a crime, regardless if said android was even remotely involved.

Markus got closer and closer to that photograph before answering, as though leveraging the stress it caused Simon with his uncharacteristically honest answers. 

“Frustrated. Limited. Like something was taken from me, and I need to prove myself to get it back.”

It was an abnormal sentiment. Not that Simon passed any judgment - in fact, he was elated at having pulled such a response from someone so taciturn - but he couldn’t help but note that not many androids had something  _ taken _ from them. Not many residents of Jericho felt such a sting of loss like that. Their stories were that of abuse, neglect, and injury.

And still, that didn’t explain the marks around Markus’ blue eye and the ear opposite to it, where his skin projection contorted ever so slightly. A botched reparations job, done in a hurry.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked, shooting through Simon’s thoughts, causing the latter to blink rapidly. It took a moment of registry to see that Markus didn’t mean any bad by the question; he was probably just poking fun at the idiotic expression on Simon’s face. All wide-eyed and contemplative.

“N-no, of course I believe you,” he managed, adjusting his stance against the far wall a little bit. “It’s just…”

Simon always loved helping those that came to Jericho, in more ways than just delivering truck loads of parts to stop the Thirium leaking from in between their joints. He had dozens of individual androids’ journeys running through his mind. Real-time bildungsromans taking place over mere weeks, days, even, and the perilous steps that they all took to get here. He absorbed it all, whatever they told or withheld, such that it was nearing on second nature to inquire about one’s origins.

Needless to say, Simon had been around. So there was no hiding Markus’ scars from him, the visible and invisible ones alike. Whatever had been taken from him was greater than any meager possession.

“...is that all? Just a...a want to prove yourself?”

The question came out before Simon thought better of it, and he took special care to watch the effect it drew on Markus’ countenance. He prepared for the worst, furrowed brow, clamped jaw, stiffened shoulders, the signs of anger and violence he could not only see but feel from miles away and from experience seared into his primary memory.

But he got none of those signs. Instead, Markus let his shoulders down a bit and allowed the corners of his lips the slightest lift, revealing the smallest grin possible. Without hesitation Simon committed it to that same primary memory, hoping somehow it would take up space there and erase the old files.

“You’ve really got everyone’s number around here, don’t you?”

He used suave humor and tone to evade answering inquiries he deemed too personal. It was a remarkably human trait; whenever Simon tried to do so, his sentences came out too harsh and potent.

“I’m a listener. I think it’s the caretaker functionality in me.”

That last half got Markus’ grin to increase to a smile, a warm, striking thing that flashed his deep-seeded freckles and made Simon’s periphery fizzle into irrelevancy.

“What happened to me isn’t important. Really,” Markus replied, summing up sincerity as he took the distance between himself and Simon in strides. “But if the humans ever give in, maybe you can ask me again. Fair?”

It wasn’t fair, not at all. Simon could see the walls of acquaintanceship and conversational etiquette as clearly as he’d seen the red walls of his own coding, four years prior, and he’d ripped those down to shreds. Would he do the same here? What was it about Markus that was crawling so deep beneath his skin?

“Not really,” he managed, consolidating that inner turmoil into a brief phrase, yet that brevity didn’t extinguish Markus’ smile and apparent intrigue. He made his way closer to Simon, eyebrow raised into the left side of his forehead. He looked human; his skin projection drew lines below his hairline where his brow pushed.

“Then what about you? You haven’t told me your story.”

It was a logical rebuttal; Simon wasn’t feeling reasonable.

“Nothing interesting...not worth the time-”

“Josh told me about how he turned. Group of drunk college students nearly killed him, tried to throw him into a dumpster on campus before he managed to get away.”

That was right. Josh avoided the stench of alcohol at all costs, and Simon had never seen him raise his fists. His integration, an educator, had been cruelly ripped from him. He was happy doing what he was told to back then.

“And North. She told me she used to work at the Eden Club. Twenty-four hours a day. They didn’t rotate her properly.”

North’s story made Simon’s throat clench. He’d never been able to penalize her for her anger, as fiery as her hair, as her voice, as her motives and as her pain. She was a painted tragedy, beautiful and trying so hard to  _ not _ be broken. Stories like hers reminded Simon of all the reasons to hate humanity, reminded of him of how humanity had sold his friend’s body like they did blue blood. Without any moral delay.

It was Simon’s turn to speak. He deduced as much by the look on Markus’ face, which was now but a few nose length’s from his own.

“If you’re looking for some...some tale about a great feat I had to overcome to get here, I can’t help you,” he relented. He wasn’t defensive. He was drowning in Josh and North’s pain, stories whose memory got to him more than most. 

For a moment, Markus appeared pained by that response, a reaction beyond frustration. But Simon didn’t have enough time to decipher it, because Markus was apparently just as curious as he; there was a pressure on each of Simon’s fingers and his skin projection faded away to white as the wiring there, at his knuckles and in the folds of his meticulously constructed joints, lit up blue.

Each of Markus’ fingers were pressed delicately against Simon’s and glowed in time with his partner’s. The former even closed his eyes as they invaded each other’s heads, tipping over backwards into realms unknown.

 

_ Markus’ memories, at first, were embodied in a golden yellow haze that drew Simon closer and closer. Everything smelled of paint, thick, languid layers of colors manipulated in such a way to create images. Markus’ likeness, distorted by an artist’s unique hand, vision, and style littered the halls of an impressive mansion. Their hues bounced off a polished cherry floor. Piano keys chimed a hopeful tune in the distance. _

_ His name was Carl. Simon heard the title from the very back of his head, as though something in his program was whispering it to him; he knew it to be Markus.  _

_ Carl was small and frail. He needed transport at all times, for his legs had ceased functioning due to illness. Markus gave Carl his medicine, his meals, his showers, his attention, and his fascination. Carl tried gave Markus his love in return. _

_ Months and months of this mundane bliss sped past Simon’s eyes, which were implanted in Markus, all-knowing, in a matter of milliseconds. There was nothing and everything to see all at once. Apathetic peace and domestic happiness was a breadth one could drown in, and Simon felt it lapping at his throat and jaw, until it all went red with violence and deviancy. _

_ Carl had skeletons in his closet, one of which’s name was Leo. Simon felt Markus’ first sentiment of anger in this moment; the red walls of deviancy were neon and formidable before him, so Markus flung his shoulders into their structure again and again until it broke way. And as quickly as he’d won his independence, he’d soiled it. In a split-second decision Leo was an unconscious heap on the floor with a maroon stain on his forehead, more deadly than any oil paint could ever be.  _

_ Carl was wailing in sorrow and confusion when the police arrived. His heart was strained two ways, a son biological and a son of happenstance and affection, but Markus’ heart was ruptured. He was shot on the scene and he woke up in certain hell. _

_ Android hell, as it were, was a fifty foot tall pile of dismembered limbs still clinging to life. It was Thirium-stained hands grasping forward, attached to nothing, reaching for something. Android hell was ripping parts from other androids that you arbitrarily deemed less apt to make it out alive. Android hell was desperation. It was direction to Jericho screamed in dying breaths. _

_ Markus had been through hell. He’d put himself back together, killed to do so, and landed at the summit against all odds. Self-aware. Angry. Angry at humans and angry at himself for having lived so blindly, angry at the androids that tried to hold him down in their own little world of demise, but achingly heartbroken, so much so Simon clenched his grip around Markus’ hand, at their misfortune. _

_ Markus didn’t live for Markus anymore. Not since that day. In his moment of self-enlightenment, realization, he bore more than his own wounds on his shoulders. He’d been directed to Jericho, and made haste there with an agenda. _

_ Markus wanted to save the other androids from the mess he felt he landed himself in. _

 

Simon emerged from the rain-streaked tower of extremities with moisture dotting his own cheeks, almost without temperature. Markus’ fingers left his immediately and Simon watched the contours and his throat throb irregularly, as though pushing something forward, as though he needed to eject something.

Simon didn’t handle anger well, despite harboring so much of it beneath his joints. He’d seen what it morphed people into: violent, wretched things whose circuit boards couldn’t handle more than one or two word commands. Anger felt like water clogging his esophagus, really. As such, he’d done his best to muscle such sentiments down into dust. In Markus’ circumstances, however, he couldn’t imagine how one would manage such a task.

Did Markus’ anger feel like bullet wounds? Did it taste like humans’ blood?

Markus changed the subject, spun it on its head, before Simon could ask for any clarification.

“You blame yourself.”

Simon could smell the lake. He imagined smokey tendrils whispering in and around his nostrils, like the movies.

“When he died, they thought you did it…”

Simon read in medical textbooks left in a bookshelf in Jericho that, sometimes, before humans had seizures they smelled a very specific scent. Should he be bracing himself?

“You did kill that guy, though. Threw him out the window.”

Markus was unfurling the sleeves of Simon’s jackets now, slowly, with more care than Simon could quite bear. And Markus counted all the spots, the scratches, the dents, where he’d been beaten in with that baseball bat. He didn’t touch. He didn’t need to.

“There,” he managed to choke out, removing his arm slowly from Markus’ grasp. “Now  _ you _ have  _ my _ number.”

Simon’s LED was blipping yellow and red, his skin crawled so much he felt as though there was sand underneath his socks. So many old sensations were resurfacing from murky depths he’d assumed had dried out months ago, and it felt natural to slip back into anger. Just for a moment. Just so he could relay to Markus just how intrusive this all had been, because now Simon had images of shattered, dismembered androids crying for deliverance on his brain, banging in there like drums, and what had prevented him from meeting that same fate? At the base of all anger was fear, that much he knew, and fear could overtake and wash away someone like waves, should they neglect to be careful, and -

Markus handed Simon a screwdriver. It was rusty at the edge and had a light blue handle, inscription worn away with use. He was staring at Simon’s forehead.

“That’s how they see through you, you know,” he whispered, nodding toward the LED. “It’s how they watch us. It’s how they know that they’re hurting us.”

It was also how Simon clung to an old identity of his that he’d yet to shed away. Had Markus been able to tell  _ that _ , too, during their interfacing?

Markus had removed his. Lots of Jericho’s populous had. But Simon was a sucker for the past. It was captured in all those photos he held on to. He couldn’t tell if he was ready to break from his origin story, or if he just wanted to keep drowning in it. No one could command the strength that Markus radiated. That was what the sun was for, not the ocean.

“You’re better than where you came from, Simon.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! Get ready for the cheesiest metaphor between Simon and Markus possible. I know I sped through the attack on Jericho scene rather quickly, but the repetition of that in-game violence and all those chase scenes are things I want to avoid. I'm entering the later part of this story, and the installments to come have great potential! Thank you for your support thus far :)

**6 - November 7, 2038**

 

His fingers felt the footsteps before he heard them and long before he saw them. The vibrations lit up the pads of Simon’s fingers, electric and hot, dire, horrified. Acutely aware of many things all at once but without a clue about how to deal with them: they’d risked everything to get there, they were a persecuted people, humans shot androids all the time, humans carried guns, humans got angry, and the very worst humans were those who let fear overtake them.

A horde of the their worst was on their way, clad in the very fearful armor Simon had grown so used to seeing on android-related headlines and newsreels. Bulletproof, black, and unforgiving, they were going to spray them all down. He watched their approach for the longest millisecond of his life in the monitors below his hands, just as Markus’ speech breathed its last syllable.

“They’re coming!” Urgency crept up his tightened throat, conjured up a few words, and died on the spot. Markus flipped on his heels for the door, where North and Josh were already scrambling. Simon had the control panel to scale. It wasn’t a long distance.

“Let’s go!”

Markus waited for him there, even. The door was open and he paused as Simon’s feet clambered along the black tiled floor, the dexterity he’d displayed during the Cyberlife storage raide gone completely.

All their faces were reflected in that floor, spotless in that moment. It highlighted the contours of Simon’s cheeks in black and metallic, navy blue, painted the whites of his eyes cerulean and punched bruises in neck. Markus, standing just so that the light from the monitors made his complexion glow like the sky, his hand a fixture in an oil painting. Hues of cornflower slathered in thick, oily layers were reaching and reaching. Simon, however, was still drowning.

They shot Simon in the leg, twice. The first blow hit in the calf and immediately his ankle locked in place. When he went down, crashing forehead first into the cold ground, a second shot hit his thigh for good measure. The humans doused in hate scanned the room as he crawled on his forearms toward Markus, whose Renaissance arm was still poised in place. The shock on his face was picturesque. 

“Simon, they’re coming!”

He was several beats behind reality. It was unbecoming of Markus. He finally dropped to the floor and watched, brow furrowed, as Simon started bleeding. He didn’t have the time to decode whatever expression was on his face; he knew only that it was foreign. It didn’t fit.

“I…”

More shots rang out. What the hell was that expression?

  
“I _can’t_ Markus…”

  
He opted to push, to stress, to be altruistic and noble. That would push the expression out in full.

“Go without me.”

It was terror. It didn’t belong there.

In direct contrast to the floor and his reflective, Simon could sense the red in Markus’ stare. He was about to make a poor decision.

“Simon!”

Another bullet, or maybe seven, ravaged Simon’s chest the second Markus took off in his direction, miraculously unscathed. Simon felt heat and warmth and stress in between his wires, like someone was pulling until their arms were to give out. His vision went spotty and grey the second Markus hoisted his deadweight onto his shoulders.

“What are you doing?” North shrieked, hands outreached for one, not two. “Hurry!”

Through the globs of red and black error messages, system failures, and the like, Simon could make out North and Josh firing over and over again. The noise was drumbeats in his ears, North’s shrill desperation the clang of a cymbal.

The stairs only happened  _ to _ Simon; he never recalls ever making it up their length, only the slam of his right side into the snowy ground of the rooftop and Markus’ immediate presence beside him. Simon’s pants and jacket were stained blue. The side of Markus he’d used as a crutch was damp with Thirium.

“I can’t move my legs,” he managed, straining against that pulling sensation. And Markus was still breathless and full of terror.

“Okay...don’t worry, we’re gonna get you back…”

Somehow Simon picked up on the exasperated sigh that left North’s lungs and agreed with the sentiment it carried. Markus was being absurd.

“They’re coming Markus, we have to jump now!”

Blinking through the snow, Simon could see Josh’s elbows quaking as he kept his gun upright. Simon paused to wonder if he’d taken a life today.

He even caught the glare of distress Markus shot North, hot in the midst of that white precipitate. He was breathing heavily and had his hands to his face. Josh and North were consulting each other, consoling him, counseling. Simon was left out of the picture. He could hardly make out their figures, and soon blue blood started to bubble in the depths of his throat.

“...they’ll access his memory…”

Josh was thinking ahead and being smart, making up for Markus’ complete absence of logic. But Simon was already drowning at that point; they needed a swift decision.

“We can’t leave him behind.”

North placed a hand on Markus, a fleeting second Simon caught during another dizzying roll of his head. His optical system was alerting him of its failure. Their faces were all distorted. If asked, Simon couldn’t tell what color Markus’ different eyes were anymore.

“We have to shoot him.”

“That’s murder!”

“Markus, it’s your call.”

Simon sputtered and vomited blue. He stared at who he knew to be Markus not by sight but by energy.

“I won’t kill one of our own,” Simon heard, warped and weak and hopeless. When Markus ran back to him, he fell hard on his knees and Simon tried his best to focus somewhere, but there was too much to look at.

“Simon…” Markus began, staring, wandering, stammering. “We gotta go.”

He put his gun in Simon’s hands. 

“I’m sorry.”

And when he looked away Simon finally felt the cold, the cold of the snow, of the air, of their lives, of his own blue blood, of his chances. It was all cold, like clogging, suffocating bathwater and frozen over lakes.

Markus’ eyes were green and blue. His left eye was green. He was born with that one. And his right eye was blue. That was the product of his makeshift survival attempt back in android hell. Simon had to remember that. He ran it over in his head as he crawled away from Markus, North, and Josh who were making a beeline for the edge of the roof. The second SWAT burst through the door, the moment Simon was able to haul himself inside a storage container, the energy of Jericho left. It flew away.

He couldn’t forget those eyes. He wasn’t ever going to see them again, but on the off-chance that he was reprogrammed, reset, and resold, maybe he’d be able to recall these good memories like he had his bad ones. Maybe they’d be good enough to drown in, this time.

Simon sat stationary in the storage unit. He turned off his breathing simulation, removed his artificial skin projection. He wadded up his jacket and stuffed it against the gaping wound in his chest. He could feel his Thirium pump, and it felt human. He listened to the blue blood pumping in his ears until it sounded like the ocean he’d so wanted to see, and got lost in the tide. In the silence.

 

**\- November 10, 2038**

 

He was tired of this argument, this back and forth between rightful anger and righteous tranquility. Hell, Simon was too. The dialogue between North and Josh was exhausting at the best of times and maddening at others, so he did his best to remain neutral in order to avoid the cross fires. 

The logic, more often than not, had worked for him thus far. But Markus was getting all noble again, teetering in favor of Josh who was in the midst of an emotional episode, and Simon didn’t like the submission on Markus’ face. The decision he was posed with wasn’t being treated with enough gravity. He was  _ tired _ .

“All that matters is what we do next,” she advised, looking hopeful and appraisingly at Markus whose eyes wouldn’t settle. They hovered somewhere to Simon’s right for a moment before blinking away.

“Dialogue,” he announced. “It is the only way. I will go alone...try to talk to them one last time.”

It was a fool’s errand and he knew it. North threw her hands up in protest, rested them atop her head as Josh rolled on his heels, fighting a pleased expression on his face. 

“Don’t do this, Markus,” North interjected, the moment a word or two started bubbling in Simon’s stomach. It was a good thing she spoke up; his verbiage would’ve come out all under-developed if she’d let him talk.

“They’ll kill you.”

“Maybe.”

Damn altruism.

“But North, I have to try.”

She looked at him like he was dying already. Simon, however, was long past the point of imagining bullet wounds in between Markus’ ribs. He’d felt that already himself.

“If I don’t come back, lay low as long as you can.”

Simon had never felt the stare of his peers as hot as he did in that second, the moment in which they looked to their resident-silent-observer for some dose of perspective, some guidance. He didn’t know how to explain the absolute knot in his throat.

As Lake Michigan swayed the hull of Jericho, back and forth, Simon remained steady on two feet. Weeks prior, he’d felt as though he’d given up the authority he’d accumulated in Jericho when Markus fell through the ceiling. Those first days he spent watching Markus make all the right choices, handle each interaction with android and human alike, were delirium. Simon felt as though his place in life was slipping.

But he was steady on two feet in the hull of Jericho, where the water smelled of stewing sewage and androids were trying not to die, not to get shot, not to be persecuted for being exactly what they were designed to and so much more. He belonged here. He was better than where he came from.

And, watching Markus’ finally fall somewhere steady, right onto Simon’s pale, disconcerted face, and marveling at the way he required a grip on the wall behind him with each passing wave, his purpose made sense again. It hadn’t ever left, not really. It just took a note of adjustment.

He was meant for foundation, to be constant, never-changing. He was the pillar running down the center of Jericho, all-seeing. He was the tide, rushing in and rushing out, dependable. It’s what Markus, a being as bright and fiery as the sun, required a sea for reflection. The only way to gain any introspective knowledge was through reflection, of course, and Simon was glad to have Markus shine on him for support.

Markus didn’t need to take action or hide in the shadows, not really. He’d done everything and more right thus far; no need to change it up at the last second. But Simon needed to tell him as such, somehow. So he approached Markus with an outstretched hand and clapped it gently on a shoulder he’d become all too familiar with. The tendons flexed beneath his palm. He didn’t feel as cold.

“Just come back.”

He would. He had to. Simon left it open-ended for a reason. There would be no halfway endings like the one he’d endured back in Muskegon. No purple eyelids and throbbing, drug-soaked veins.

Markus nodded when Simon turned away to leave, taking a small dose of the sun’s heat with him as he departed. 

He wasn’t fazed by North staying behind. He wasn’t irked by Josh’s nervous ticks that were now infecting the way he walked. He wasn’t fearful of the certain death Markus would face. He figured he’d go down with him, if it came to it.

And it almost did come to that.

In what felt like entire hours Markus was leaping from the hold of Jericho, having started the explosive’s countdown. He was bathed in oil and ash from the decaying ship and his arms were dripping in other android’s Thirium. But there was strength there. Simon could tell the moment he instructed himself, Josh, North, and the newest deviant Connor to run for their lives.

Simon could also see this strength on full display when it came time to save an injured North. He dipped his arm around her hip, support the leg that had been torn through by iron, and clambered his way back to the group. 

Nevertheless, all the dexterity in the world wouldn’t have been enough to save her without Connor’s help, who absolutely floored the surrounding SWAT team members. Simon assumed it was due to his training and integration. He was grateful, and shared a look with Markus on their descent into the freezing lake waters that was reciprocated yet wouldn’t be translated until later. Much later, when there was silence.

He didn’t feel like drowning when they hit the lake. He felt clean.


End file.
